Online catnip: queues are already forming for the social media star’s dining room
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)One of the first things you’ll see as you arrive at Straker’s is the chef-proprietor’s motorcycle. Right there, beside the little entrance, sits social media star Thomas Straker’s lean, handsomely begrimed café racer-style ride. It is an unexpected bit of old school, petrol-headed ornamentation that is, perhaps, at odds with the glossy wholesomeness you might associate with a venture being billed in some quarters as a “TikTok restaurant”. If it jars slightly as an introduction then that is, I think, quite instructive.
Because, yes, OK: Straker is best known as a tousle-haired, butter-foaming king of viral recipes, whose slick, rapid-cut instructional videos have amassed an enormous online audience (he has 1.6 million TikTok followers and an accumulated 2.1 billion views on the platform) and speak to a new mode of lucrative, digital age culinary stardom. But then on the other, he is also a classically trained chef — initially at Ballymaloe and then with stints at The Ledbury and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal — who grew up hunting, foraging and fishing near his family’s smallholding in rural Herefordshire.
His trajectory is at once representative of a maverick, modern way of doing things and also a pretty well-traced arc of gastronomic career progression. And this tussle, between the new school and the old, is at the heart of the charms and challenges of this much-anticipated and mostly impressive opening.
What is absolutely not in doubt is that the narrow Golborne Road location is already one of the hottest spots in town. Attended by queues in its first weeks and booked out until January, they do at least keep a few tables back for walk-ins. It is a crackling and permanently-rammed burst of convivial restaurant cool, girded in sexily-ribbed pine-green banquettes and stalked by an unusually high quantity of young staff in specially embroidered workwear jackets. The soundtrack is low-slung jazz funk and the percussive rattle of cocktails being shaken behind the bar. Tables were, when I snuck in for a recent weekday lunch, generally occupied by young millennial Strakolytes, amorous couples gripping each other’s hands over salted negroni sbaglioto, and happily bemused retired army major types dragged along by their adult children.
Straker’s cuisine is unfussy modern British, hit with some Mediterranean sun and self-described as “food you want to eat”. Though perhaps an even quicker route to understanding it is to just dig into one of the exceptional, rotating flatbreads that give any meal here immediate lift-off. For me, this meant the cavolo nero and stracciatella number: a puffed-up, char-freckled personal pizza, filled with oozing cheese and a delectable, ferrous swamp of cooked-down greens. BBQ quail pieces had a similarly effective ruggedness, arriving as they did in a thin pool of slurpable gravy and atop aubergine softened into a kind of smoky, vegetal porridge. Beautifully milky sweetbreads beneath a heaping of radicchio, crisped shallots and papery, fried mint could have benefitted from, as the old Coco Chanel maxim goes, taking off an accessory or two.
The anticipated issue with a viral recipe success story like Straker’s might be faddishness or overly simplistic food. But, for me, most of the minor hiccups — very rare turbot with nothingy cabbage and a butter sauce; mandolined crescents of honey-dribbled, pumpkin fritti where the balance of sweetness was slightly off — stemmed from the kitchen’s freewheeling spirit running a little too wild. They are, if you remove the surrounding din of hype, the sort of eminently fixable issues one might expect from a first-time restaurateur.
Straker's is a crackling, rammed burst of convivial restaurant cool, girded in sexily ribbed banquettes
“Can we have the bill and also see about booking for next week?” said the twenty-something couple next to me, as I polished off a very good set custard with grilled muscat grapes. It helpfully underlined why that motorcycle, as it turns out, will soon have to make way for some much-needed, heated overflow seating outside.
Straker has conquered the digital realm and possibly cracked the code of aspirational deliciousness for a new generation. There is more than enough at his buzzy, eponymous debut restaurant to suggest that sustained offline glory is very much within his grasp.
